Thus, it seems to me, the broad bean and the apple-tree are persuasive defenders of civilisation and of those concomitants of civilisation morality and the arts.  Heretics frequently arise, both in ethics and in the arts, who say:  “No more restraints!  Give the bean its head.”  There are psycho-analysts who appear to regard frustration as the one serious evil in life, and the apostles of vers libre denounce metre and rhyme because these merely serve to frustrate the natural impulses of the imagination.  As a matter of fact, it is this very frustration that gives poetry much of its depth and vehemence.  Great genius expresses itself, not in the freedom of formlessness, but in the limitations of form.  Shakespeare’s passion turned instinctively to the most frustrative of all poetic forms—­that of the sonnet—­in order to express itself in perfection.  It is, as a rule, those who have nothing to say who wish to say it without the terrible frustrations of form.  Obviously, there is a golden mean in the arts as in all things, and there comes a point at which form passes into formalism.  Genius requires just enough frustration to increase its vehemence, and so to transmute nature into art.  It is possible that some frustration of a comparable kind is needed in order to transmute nature into morality, and that the man who would, in Milton’s phrase, make of his life a poem must submit to commandments as difficult as those of metre or rhyme.  It is not merely the Christians and the Stoics who have maintained this; Epicurus himself was a believer in virtue as a means to happiness.  This, indeed, is a commonplace written all over the face of nature.  There is no great happiness without opposition except for children.  The climber struggles with the hill, the rower with the water, the digger with the earth.  They are all men who live on the understanding that the pleasures of difficulty are greater even than the pleasures of ease.

The biographies of famous men are prolific of examples that support the theory of frustration.  Homer, they say, was blind, and the legend seems to suggest that his blindness, far from injuring, abetted his genius.  Tyrtæus, being physically unable to fight, became the poet of fighting, and achieved more with his words than did most men with their weapons.  Demosthenes, again, was an orator frustrated by many defects.  Everyone knows the story of his wretched articulation and how he shut himself up and practised speaking with pebbles in his mouth in order to overcome it.  Few of the great orators, indeed, seem to have succeeded in oratory without difficulty.  Neither Cicero nor Burke spoke with the natural ease of many a young man in a Y.M.C.A. debating society.  And the great writers, like the great orators, have been, in many instances, men doomed in some important respect to lead frustrated lives.  Mr Beerbohm recently said that he has never known a man of genius whose life was not marred by some obvious defect.